Céleste Artois did not understand what she was seeing. She’d followed the songbirds down to the Vault of Dreams and was now at the bottom of the corkscrew staircase. At least, it should have been the bottom. A large stretch of the cavern floor was gone—crumbled in on itself. Dreams shimmered over actual dust, and there was a different shine stirring out of the haze. Silver scales and wings…
“Is that a dragon?” Anastasia called out a few steps above.
“No.” Sylvie appeared next to the princess, her orange wings fluttering. “That’s Honoré!”
Only, Céleste had never seen her friend’s ring grow so large before. It was nearly the size of a boat, rising from a sea of broken stones. Her mind scrambled, trying to make sense of the scene. What had happened? Why was the dragon writhing in the middle of the collapsed floor? Its tail thrashed across shards of stone. Its neck arched as it if were in pain.
Was Honoré hurt? Céleste searched the rubble for signs of the other Enchantress. Skulls started to appear. Fragments of bone had been scattered by a metallic tail, landing on a striped shirt. That pattern… it looked familiar…
“I thought Honoré was searching the catacombs,” the princess kept saying.
“She was,” Sylvie answered. “Marmalade told me she found her brother digging.”
Céleste spied another striped shirt and a red scarf peeking out from the stones. A limp hand. A pickaxe handle. These were Terreur’s men, she realized. Were being the operative word. Almost every one of them was dead, their faces plastered with the dust of even older bones. She hadn’t known the catacombs snaked out this far, that there was something even deeper than dreams beneath La Fée Verte’s salon.
Terreur must have though.
He’d sent these men.
To dig. To die.
“Honoré?” she croaked.
The dragon was still moving—that had to be a good sign, no? Only, the movements weren’t silky silver, but clunky. Pained. The way a cart horse might limp along on three legs. Céleste looked past the last stair, trying to judge whether her own leg would break if she jumped.
“I wouldn’t, mon amour.” Rafe landed on the step beside her; his shadow wings fanned as he reached out and grabbed her hand. “That relic’s agitated; best let La Fée Verte approach it first.”
His palm was warm over hers, but it wasn’t this that stopped Céleste. Rafe was holding the same hand that had taken the dragon’s fang. Even though the wound was gone, she could still feel that sudden surge of silver. She still felt uneasy whenever she stood too close to Honoré’s ring…
La Fée Verte had no such hesitations. The Sanct flew to the cavern’s collapsed floor, surrounded by a cloud of songbirds. These swirled around the dragon’s head too. It snapped at the first few before folding its own wings in.
In, in.
Metal began to pull back like a tide, revealing not a line of shells but a boy. Gabriel. That was the name Rafe had uttered, before The Rite of Spring. It was easy to see why he’d mistaken Honoré for her brother. The effect of the siblings, side by side, was mirror-esque. In fact, Gabriel looked even more like his sister than she did. Honoré no longer resembled a knight so much as one of those effigy statues that lay over medieval tombs. When the dragon ring stopped moving, half the Enchantress stayed swallowed in metal—her entire right arm. Up the neck. Down the hip. Had she broken it? There seemed to be an extra bone jutting through…
No.
Not a bone.
After all this time playing with knives, Honoré Côte had finally gotten herself stabbed.
Céleste’s breath sharpened when she saw the hilt.
Rafe squeezed her hand and swore softly.
La Fée Verte knelt over Honoré’s chest, placing a hand over her breastbone.
It rose.
It fell.
“She’s still alive.”
Still. Céleste didn’t like that word. It implied a ticking clock. She didn’t like the location of the knife either, nor the way the dragon coiled around its hilt. Agitated. The silver even bared its fangs at Sylvie, when the youngest Enchantress flew down to join La Fée Verte.
“I can help you heal her.” The girl didn’t know what she was offering—obviously—as she held out her hand.
One person’s flesh can only be mended with another’s.
“No!” Céleste pulled her healed palm from Rafe’s and jumped to the broken ground below, her ankle nearly twisting, her knees scraping against a larger piece of rubble. Time would tend to those wounds, but the knife in Honoré’s torso was a different matter. “Use me,” she said.
La Fée Verte looked up.
There was a gleam in her eyes that didn’t belong to magic at all.
“She’s dying,” the Sanct said.
“So am I,” Céleste argued. It was the only reason this mad scheme might work—her body was actively defying death thanks to Rasputin’s magic. Surely that spell could handle a knife stab as well. “Give me Honoré’s wound, and maybe we both have a chance at surviving…” She was all too aware of Anastasia Nikolaevna standing on the spiral staircase, all too aware that each breath she took belonged to the grand duchess’s brother. It was his life Céleste was offering.
Since they’d been introduced, she’d hardly been able to look at the princess. But this truth was even harder to face: Honoré’s lips were beginning to go blue, and Céleste could still taste horseshoes, and no one else in the Vault of Dreams could take her place. Certainly not Sylvie. The eleven-year-old somehow looked younger as she knelt over Honoré—and older too, when her eyes met Céleste’s and she frowned.
La Fée Verte’s own expression was unreadable.
A molten gold tear streaked her cheek as she studied Honoré.
“This is very noble of you and everything, but there’s no guarantee this will work.” Rafe landed next to Céleste, worry engraved on his face.
“I’ll risk it,” she said. “Better a bleeding heart than none at all.”
“Well, you might bleed out before we reach rue des Ombres, and what the hell will I tell Terreur when I carry your corpse to his doorstep?” He raked a hand through his black, black hair. The worry on his face turned to agony. “I can’t do this without you, Céleste.”
And I can’t do this without Honoré.
More rust fortified her tongue. “Tell him I got caught in the collapse.” Céleste nodded at the Vault of Dreams. “We should have been forging dreams here, regardless.” Instead, she’d been sitting at a bar, helping Sylvie seed silly ideas into a champagne heiress’s head, while Honoré had been fighting for her life.
Their lives.
Céleste knelt beside her friend, pressing her own hand to La Fée Verte’s, both over Honoré’s chest. The Sanct’s fingers trembled beneath hers. And beneath that? A faint heartbeat, growing fainter.
“I know you’re afraid to perform this type of magic,” she whispered to the Sanct, “but Honoré deserves more than your fear.”
The corner of La Fée Verte’s mouth twisted. “Even the brave…” she whispered to herself.
Her hand stilled.
Céleste reached for the offending knife. The dragon did not bite when her fist tightened around the hilt, but retreated to reveal a blood-stiffened tunic. Hot, torn skin.
“This wouldn’t have happened with a cheese knife, mon amie.” She knew the other Enchantress was past hearing, but it made what came next bearable.
Céleste pulled out the blade.
It felt as if she were stabbing herself—she was, in a way. La Fée Verte’s masque flashed gold. The knife gleamed garnet. Céleste’s right lung was on fire. She crumpled over it into Rafe’s arms. He’d swept in to catch her, and there was such a sureness to the way he held her that she no longer felt like she was spinning to pieces. Burning, yes. The wound felt as if a hundred hornets had flown down her blouse, but when Rafe gently lifted the edges of the fabric, she found that she could breathe. Still breathe.
He stopped short of her corset, letting out a relieved breath of his own. “I don’t see any blood, thank God…”
The Mad Monk’s magic was working.
So was La Fée Verte’s. It was like watching a daguerreotype come to life, as color returned to Honoré’s face. Yet other parts of the Enchantress stayed silvered. Céleste kept waiting for the dragon to pull back from her newly healed wound, but it didn’t, and it didn’t.